New advanced interference filters by Schott meets specifications from medical to astronomy purposes

Fluorescence filters from SCHOTT allow for exact separation of illumination and observation wavelengths. This produces images with rich contrast.
Photo by Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Adolf-Butenandt-Institute.

The international technology group SCHOTT has significantly extended its coating expertise at its plant in Yverdon, Switzerland. As a result, the company that is an expert on specialty glass now offers a full range of interference filters that meet customer specifications. Its selection spans everything from sophisticated fluorescence and Raman filters for use in medical diagnostics to filters for astronomy. In fact, its product line also includes coatings for high-performance, high energy lasers. SCHOTT presented its filters at OPTATEC, the international trade exhibition on optical technologies, components and systems, in Frankfurt/Main from May 20 – 22, 2014.

“We made several investments at our plant in Yverdon in order to be able to offer this spectrum of coatings and thus expanded our manufacturing expertise and production capacities quite significantly. We develop, design and manufacture completely on the basis of customer specifications,” explains Prof. Dr. Steffen Reichel, application engineer at SCHOTT Advanced Optics.

Thanks to its new coating expertise, the filters SCHOTT offers are extremely smooth; they can be manufactured to have low surface roughness. The coatings are also known for their high quality and durability. Fully automated manufacturing, including optical online monitoring, also ensures high reproducibility and process stability.

Coatings for a wide range of applications The highly advanced fluorescence and Raman filters that SCHOTT offers according to customer specifications are used in the area of medical diagnostics. The fluorescence filters for analyzing fluids are actually bandpass filters. In fact, a microscope used to analyze fluorescent dyestuffs contains a set of components that consist of three filters that are each made up of as many as several hundred layers. Excitation bandpass filters, dichroic filters and emission bandpass filters are precisely tailored to match each other. Only then can exact diagnostic results be guaranteed. Several different types of filters are used in filters for Raman spectroscopy, including bandpass, short pass, long pass and notch filters. Monochromatic light from a laser is usually used in this diagnostic method to analyze a sample.

The high-quality filters that SCHOTT offers can also be used in astronomy: steep edge and narrow-band bandpass filters with an extremely broad blocking area that ranges from the UV all the way to the near IR range. These filters are typically used to perform spectral analysis of the universe in satellites and in the instruments of ground-based telescopes.

SCHOTT also offers coatings for use in high energy lasers. Research laboratories and material processing lasers depend on them to achieve the maximum, extremely high laser damage threshold.

Broad range of product properties possible SCHOTT offers a wide range of hard coatings, from laser and scratch-resistant, anti-reflective coatings like those that are used in the cover glasses of high-quality wrist watches to laser-hard laser mirrors or dichroic filters such as beam splitters and polarizers. Furthermore, these coatings enable many other different product functions: density and climate resistance, high temperature stability, low transmission losses, better adhesion, thermal stability of spectral performance and the slightest inclusions of water inside a coating.

For more information, please visit http://www.schott.com.